Generally, manufacturing involves the making of products for sale, e.g., by constructing the products from component parts. Once produced, the products are often stored as inventory, e.g., in warehouse facilities, and ultimately shipped to retail stores or directly to consumers.
In a typical manufactory environment, every product may require multiple capacities to be built to generate profits. As many products may require different but possibly shared capacities and generate different profits as well as being demanded at different levels, capacity planning is a complex process. Further, such processes may be highly complex in that capacity expansion may require different price tags to improve production levels of products. As such, capacity planning is an important issue when trying to meet future demand and to analyze profitability with reference to upfront investment. Since many parameters and variables (e.g., types of capacity expansion options, monetary investment needed for each option, etc.) are introduced in a capacity planning process, decision-making and calculations to develop with a capacity expansion plan may be considered difficult. Therefore, there currently exists a need to simply the process by which capacity expansion is determined.